ONE THING about the government: You can always count on it to come up with plenty of new things for people to be required to do. Some of these rules are actually good ideas and go to government’s most basic purposes, such as making the streets safe and protecting individual liberty.

And then there’s the 1.28-gallon toilet.

Not too long ago, faced with an intractable water shortage that threatened the health and safety of the people of the Monterey Peninsula, the local water district went deep into its well of wisdom and started requiring people to get rid of the four- or five-gallon-per-flush toilets that had been around since the toilet was invented, and replace them with new, eco-friendly 1.6-gallon per flush models. Over the years, tens of thousands of local homeowners and businesses have complied at great expense. The new toilets work poorly, make a lot of noise and constantly have to be double-flushed and cleaned, but, hey, we’ve gotten used to them. The water shortage is an emergency, right? So who’s going to complain about spending a few hundred bucks and going to quite a bit of inconvenience when there’s an emergency to be alleviated?

Truly, we’ve all been indoctrinated with the idea that never hosing off a sidewalk, installing low-flow showerheads, faucets and toilets, planting drought-tolerant landscapes, and instituting a host of other water-saving measures are practically moral obligations, and requiring universal compliance with such precepts is one of the essential achievements of modern law and environmental conscientiousness. Hooray for the 1.6-gallon toilet.

Unfortunately, as with most environmental issues, yesterday’s triumph of green thinking and technology is today’s wasteful capitulation to consumerism and capitalistic excess.

Thus, just as suddenly as pretty much everybody got through installing and learning to live with the 1.6-gallon toilet, voilà!, it’s no longer good enough. You must switch to the latest and greatest 1.28-gallon model.

Of course, you’re being offered a “rebate” to make the switch. But the rebate is with your money. BFD, as they say on the Internet.

When programs such as this come along, you have to wonder if the toilet-manufacturing lobby is behind the change. Remember when GFI outlets became required for every outlet in new homes and remodels? You can be sure the people who make those expensive outlets were the proponents of the rule. And when carbon-monoxide detectors were suddenly required in every single-family home, the smart money would have invested a year or two ago in the companies that manufacture those detectors and the retailers that sell them. Radon detectors aren’t required in every living room yet? Somewhere, somebody is working on the campaign to convince Congress and state legislatures that people all over this great nation are dying horrible deaths that would be prevented ... if only every family were required to spend $100.

And somewhere else, the half-gallon-per-flush toilet is being developed, and after that the waterless model. (Oh, wait. They already have that. It’s called an outhouse.)

Keep working, folks, because you’re going to need a lot of money to buy things you don’t yet realize you can’t be allowed to live without.